Saturday, November 14, 2009

The Return of The Enterprise Crew

About ten years ago I created a website dedicated to the crewmembers of the original Star Trek's starship Enterprise. It was one of the most ambitious projects I had ever undertaken. It started when I bought the Star Trek Concordance reference book which had more detailed cast lists than I had seen before. I particularly noticed that many uncredited actors appeared over and over again. When watching the series (then airing on Swedish Kanal 5) it became apparent that even these cast lists were incomplete and I decided to go through all the episodes and build a more complete list.

When I knew what I wanted to do, I sat down with my VHS tapes recorded off the TV and started watching, noting down every crewmember appearing, their gender, uniform color and rank stripes. Sometimes they were given a name on the air and sometimes I knew who the actor or actress was. I also took help from the alt.tv.star-trek.tos newsgroup and the NitCentral discussion board. (The relevant threads can be found here.) The results were presented on a website titled "The Enterprise Crew". There was an episode and a character list, a page for every episode listing the appearing crewmembers, and a character page detailed what each character was seen doing in each episode.

Now to what this post is really about, I've decided to try to do it all over again! This time I am going to go through each episode and do a write-up for each in a more bloggish fashion. The previous website only featured crewmembers of Starfleet, but this time I'm going to include anyone appearing in an episode. For every episode, starting with Where No Man Has Gone Before, going in production order, I will provide pictures of all actors and extras, with notes and references to their previous appearances, if any. I might sneak in a little information on things like recurring props, changes to sets, and other tidbits, and perhaps some personal opinions on the episodes as well.

Join me next post for the first of these episodes, hopefully with comments and discussions from the readers I will be inspired enough to go through the whole series!